He gave an impatient flick of the hand. "I've fallen further."
Karou was skeptical. The minaret towered overhead, the tallest structure in the city.
Seeing her glance up at it, Razgut chuckled again. It was a curdled sound: mangled misery and spite.
"That's nothing, blue lovely. A thousand years ago, I fell from heaven."
Razgut was a living pain tithe.
He had once been a seraph, but now he was a thing of bruises and blood and brokenness. They had torn off his wings, oh, his glorious wings. Fiery feathers had swirled around him, caught in the eddies of his screams. Razgut had caught one in his fingers slick with blood, gazed at it for a long time as it dimmed to ash, crumbled in his hands.
But they weren't content with dimming his fire, oh no. They had to cast him out of a slash in the sky as well, make sure he never returned.
But if they thought he would beg for mercy, they were sorely mistaken. He was a Faerer, after all: one of the chosen Twelve. They could tear off his wings and beat him bloody, but they couldn't take that pride and glory away from him. Oh, spite. Oh, misery.
Even now, the seraph soldiers depended on him as they dragged him over the Bay of Beasts toward the portal. His portal.
Razgut remembered making that rip of sky with nothing more than his fingers and the force of his will. He had rent through the air and looked down at that other world – Earth – with all the discoverer's right of possession. Its sun had been so young and bright and golden, a seraph of its own.
Now there was only deepest night, a host of dazzling constellations. Razgut had seen many wonders in the pages of the universes that he had traveled, but even he gasped in that moment to see their glory.
Then the seraph soldier hoisted Razgut by one bloody wing-spur and, without preamble, thrust him into another world.
For an instant, Razgut forgot his pain as he hung motionless in a sea of stars. He even forgot that he had no wings. Then gravity began its inexorable pull, and Razgut's wonder turned to shock - and then to terror.
He was flightless, helpless, hopeless.
So Razgut fell faster and faster, twisting through the air with dizzying speed. The stars around him blurred to streaks of light, until it seemed they must be torn from the sky; and he was one of them, too, a falling star.
Through a distant slash of night, several smoldering feathers drifted down after him, winking out of existence one by one.
.
.
.
And, in the Morocco desert far below, a child looked up and made a wish.